Historical Necessity and Freewill

Schmidt Number: S-3445

On-line since: 31st August, 2010

Lecture 2

Concerning the World of the Dead

Dornach, December 9, 1917

As I have
already remarked, we shall consider certain matters during
these lectures which will then culminate, tomorrow or the
next day, in an exposition of
Historical Necessity and Free Will,
will culminate by my having to show in what
sense an historical event is necessary, and in what sense
such an event — as something which, generally speaking,
interferes in the soul-sphere of human life — could
also be otherwise than it is. Indeed, at the present time —
when such important occurrences are interfering in human life
— this is a problem which is of very special, deeply
penetrating significance; for, in face of the sad,
catastrophic events of the present day (the war) every human
being must indeed ask himself the question: — in how
far are such happenings — and directly this present one
— dependent on a certain necessity and in how far could
the present occurrence have turned out differently, had it
been able to assume a different aspect.

As we
indicated, it will be our aim during these lectures to reply
to this large, inclusive question with means that we can have
at our disposal now in the occult basis that is to be
explained in public lectures. But we must proceed from a more
inclusive consideration of human life. We must deepen
ourselves somewhat, from a certain aspect, in human nature
itself For, as you are perhaps able to gather directly from
the public lectures held recently, in human life the forces
of that world are playing in which the human being finds
himself between death and a new birth. Into this life —
much more intensely than one imagines — are the forces
playing, in which the human being is embedded, as the
so-called dead. We are, as human beings, so fashioned —
in the last lecture I drew attention more to the physical
aspect — that in reality, the threshold between the
everyday physical world and the spiritual world, cuts
right through our midst. If we hold in mind our everyday
life, and what we have considered the last time more from the
physical side, today more from the side of the soul, then we
may say: While we are incarnated here in the physical body,
our human life runs its course in such a way that we have
active in us, first, everything that can be experienced
through the senses during our life, everything that is
outspread around us, so to say, as a tapestry of the sense
impressions, and from which we receive knowledge through our
senses. Upon this world, then, everything is built which we
elaborate out of this sense world, but which we also,
independently of it, are able to interpenetrate in our
thought life. When, however, we unite sense life and thought
life, we have in reality everything in which we live with our
usual waking consciousness.

From the moment
we awaken in the morning until the moment we fall asleep, we
are awake in reality only in our sense impressions and in our
thought life. We are not awake at all, in the full sense of
the word, in our feelings, in our feeling life. And there,
between the thought life and the feeling life, practically
unnoticed for the everyday consciousness, lies the threshold.
For what interpenetrates our feeling life as a deeper reality
does not actually come to consciousness at all in the human
being. The feelings themselves do [not?] come to
consciousness in him. They surge up and down out of a
subconscious world. But the consciousness has really nothing
more to do with feeling that we in sleep have to do with our
dreams. Therefore it was possible recently to say here in
Switzerland in public lectures: — While the human being
lives in his feeling life, he is actually asleep and
dreaming. The dream life extends itself over into our waking
life. We are really continuously in a dream state from the
moment of going to sleep to that of awakening, but only those
dreams are remembered or enter our consciousness that are
most strongly connected with our physical existence; dreaming
continues on throughout the entire sleep life. Only in the
deeper layers of our consciousness do we sleep, so to say,
dreamlessly. But this dreaming and dreamless sleep life goes
over into our feeling life, into the life of our affections.
And we know no more of the reality, of the actual content of
the ordinary consciousness in the non-clairvoyant
consciousness of our feeling life, than we know what actually
occurs when the images of the dream life run their course
before us. Therefore it was also stated in these lectures
that the human being does not inwardly experience the content
of what is termed “History” with waking
consciousness, but dreams it through, goes through
it in a dream. History is what may be termed a cosmic dream
of the human being. For the impulses that live in history
live actually in feeling and emotional impulses. He dreams,
while he inwardly experiences, history. Thus the life of
feeling lies quite underneath the threshold of the real,
waking consciousness. In this soul relationship also the
boundary between the conscious and the unconscious life cuts
right across the middle of the human being. In his will life
the human being sleeps completely. For with his everyday
consciousness he knows nothing about what actually lives in
the will. His ordinary consciousness lives in the reality
that expresses itself in the will in exactly the same way in
which he lives in deep sleep. He follows consciously only
that which, proceeding out of the will, has gone over into
action. In this he awakens; in the execution of the will he
cannot awaken. Therefore the philosophers continually quarrel
about the freedom and the non-freedom of the will, because
they are unable to penetrate into the region that can only be
seen into with clairvoyant consciousness, the region out of
which the will really draws its impulses.

Thus — I
accentuate it once more — in the soul relationship
also, the threshold lies between the actual physical world of
waking life and the world which remains subconscious for him,
lies in the midst of the human being himself, for
this human being.

Now everything
which the human being experiences and lives with between
death and a new birth plays right into his life, insofar as
it is the life of the feeling and the will — that is,
insofar as it has been dreamt and slept through. What the
dead live through is actually in the world in which we are
living, in as far as we feel and will. Only we do not know
with ordinary consciousness the realities that live in
feeling and willing. If we could live through the
reality which gives the basis of the feeling life,
if we would live through especially the reality giving the
basis of the willing life, just as in waking we live through
the reality of the sense perceptions and the thought
conceptions — the conceptions indeed to a minor degree,
nevertheless to a certain degree — then would the
departed, the man who has passed through the portals of
death, be just as much beside us, in continual association
with us, as someone who still walks about with us here on the
physical plane, so that we are able to receive impressions
from him in our waking consciousness by means of our senses
and thought life. What is living in the impulses of the
departed dead ascends continually within our feeling life,
into the life of our will impulses. And only because we dream
and sleep this away do we feel separated from the dead with
whom we were associated.

In reality,
however, the world in which the so-called dead live is quite
different from the world in which we live while we are
incarnated in the physical body. For observe, when you ask
quite seriously: what then exists for the waking
non-clairvoyant consciousness from the time of waking until
going to sleep? The answer is: Only that which can be lived
through in the world which is spread out as a tapestry of the
sense impressions and also in the world we fashion out of it
for ourselves by means of our thought conceptions. From this
world, in the first place, everything belonging to the
so-called mineral kingdom, for which the sense organs are
used in perceiving, is not directly existent for the dead. To
this mineral world belong, for example, also the stars, the
sun and moon; in general everything belongs to it that is
perceptible to the senses, and to it belongs also a large
region of the plant world. These are regions that primarily
do not lie open to the spiritual- and soul-eyes of the
dead.

On the other
hand there begins to open up already for the soul-eyes of the
dead the world of which we are more or less unconscious when
we direct our glance toward it — the glance which is of
course veiled by the sense world — that is to say the
world of impulses, of forces which live in the animals. This
is for the dead the lowest world, in exactly the same way
that the mineral world is the lowest world for us here in the
physical body. Just as for us the plant world, which sprouts
forth out of the mineral kingdom, builds itself up, so, for
the dead, the human world, as soul world, erects itself upon
the foundation that lives in the animal world. And just as
the animal world forms the third category, which erects
itself upon the mineral and plant world, so the kingdom of
the Angels, Archangels, etc., forms a higher kingdom in the
world of the dead.

The entire
environment into which the departed one is transposed is
thereby different from the environment in which we ourselves
live in the physical body. For just conceive for a moment how
it would be, were everything you perceive with the senses
taken out of the world which you perceive with your physical
body, about which you, in your physical body, form concepts.
There would be something remaining over and above for the
non-clairvoyant perception which can only have the appearance
of a dream world, a world which can only be dreamed, which
cannot live any more strongly in the consciousness than a
dream. But the distinction becomes clearer if we hold the
difference in mind in yet another way. Just notice that as
long as we are incarnated in the physical body, the essential
thing that lends character to our lives (the chief
characteristic) is that we (although inwardly the matter is
difficult as you know from other lectures) are able to have
the consciousness that whatever we do with the
beings of the mineral and plant kingdoms — as a result
of our intercourse with them — remains relatively a
matter of indifference to them. We act indeed under the
influence of this thought just expressed. We break the stone
calmly and have the idea that we do not cause the stone pain,
nor also give it any joy. You know that inwardly the matter
is somewhat different: but in as far as we human beings are
in touch with the surrounding mineral world, we think with a
certain justification that joy and pain is not at once
aroused when we break a stone to pieces or do something
similar.

In a like
manner do we relate ourselves to the plant world. The human
beings are now very rare who, for example, feel a sort of
pain, have a somewhat similar feeling when a flower is
plucked. The individuals, who in a certain sense still prefer
to have the rose on the rosebush than to have the rose
bouquet in the room, are not at all so numerous. It is only
with the animal world that we begin to bring our human nature
directly into relationship with the surrounding world. And
yet let it be said once more: — the human beings are
just now quite rare among present day people who have a
feeling — only distantly similar to be sure —
when plucking roses similar to the one they would have were
the heads of animals being torn off in order to bind them
together in a nosegay: — even among anthroposophists I
have found that not everyone always prefers to have roses on
the rose-bush — although indeed the feeling has already
progressed so far that there has never been, let us say, a
bouquet of nightingale heads presented in a hall! Now we are
beginning to feel how the life that extends itself out of us
continues on into our surrounding world.

The departed
has no such condition. For him nothing exists at all in the
environment for which he could not have the feeling that if
he were only to stretch out a finger — this is now
expressed quite symbolically, in imagery — then what is
accomplished — through the sticking out of his finger,
indeed, through any action whatever, yes, through everything
done by the dead — would not bring about, would not
release joy and pain in the environment. He does not enter at
all into relationship with his surroundings unless he awakens
joy and pain, unless there exists an echo of joy and pain. If
you do something after you have passed through the portals of
death, then through your action, wherever it may be, pain or
joy, tension or relaxation of something is continually
occurring which is similar to the feeling life. If we knock
on a table we feel that it does not pain the table. The one
who is dead can never carry out an action without knowing
that he lives and weaves, not only into the living element,
but into the living element filled with feeling. The
feeling-filled incitement is spread out over his entire
environment.

From another
aspect you will find that described in the corresponding
chapter of my book
Theosophy.
This world of incitement filled with feeling lives thus upon the
lowest level there above in the animal kingdom. And just as we
are acquainted with a certain external side of the mineral
kingdom by means of our sense perceptions, so is the departed
dead familiar, over the extent of his whole world, with the
inner side, not with the outer form, but with the inner
aspect of animal life. This animal life is the lowest basis
upon which he lives, upon which he fashions himself, upon
which he erects his existence. And a large amount of work of
the dead consists in their placing themselves in direct
relationship to the world of living animal creatures. Just as
we here on earth, from childhood on, place ourselves in
connection with the dead mineral world, so do we after death
establish ourselves continually on a broad and expanding,
growing relationship to the world of the living animal. This
world the dead person learns to know on all sides. This world
the departed learns to know through having to penetrate step
by step all the secrets which here on earth are concealed
from him, just as that is concealed from his soul which
slumbers underneath his feeling life, for it is the same
thing.

Granted, such a
question as the one I now intend to interject cannot be
allowed as a proper scientific one. But it can nevertheless
point toward something behind which real relationships exist.
It can be asked: why then is there so much really concealed
from the human being here in the physical world by the
governing power of the all-penetrating world wisdom? We can
ask, why is that concealed into which the dead must be
initiated, the mysteries of the construction of the whole
animal world?

Directly when
we attempt to answer such a question, we plunge into the
deepest of all mysteries of existence. And in these
considerations we shall have to try to understand this
question also. In the first place, however, we must perceive
how this comprehension of the inner side of the animal life
really takes place.

Here I might
proceed, in order not to become theoretical, from a fact of
recent history. You know that in a certain external way human
historical consciousness has experienced a change in modern
times through so-called Darwinism. There has been an endeavor
to find the forces by means of which the organisms evolve
from the so-called imperfect condition. The Darwinists have
named several kinds: — primarily the principle of
special selection, survival of the fittest, the adjustment to
environment, etc., I do not intend to come to you with these
things which you indeed can read in every handbook on
Darwinism, even in every encyclopedia. But I wish to point
out that those are external, abstract principles: that for
those who look deeper, nothing at all is said thereby. What
actually happens is not shown when it is said: the perfection
occurs through the selection of the fittest, the others
gradually dying out and the fittest surviving. Here nothing
is actually said about the forces, about the impulses that
actually live in the animal kingdom — in order that
these creatures may be able not only first to perfect
themselves but also to be able to frame their life
correspondingly in the ordinary present-day world. What
really acts in the forces of selection, in forces that are
put forward by Darwinism as forces of selection, as forces
that are of a purely mechanically purposeful character. It is
the dead working there. It belongs to the most astonishing
and impressive experiences which can be made in the circle of
the dead, to discover that just as here there are smiths and
joiners and others who work in the world of mechanics, in the
handicrafts, and thereby create the physical sensible basis
of life here, so in the spirit realm, beginning with the
animal kingdom and upwards, do the dead work. While the
animal kingdom here in many respects is such that we
feel it to be an inferior one — however, the mineral
world lies indeed still lower — yet the very basis of
the work of the dead is the furthering of the animal kingdom.
Therefore, the departed become accustomed to living in all
the skillfulness that is concealed from him, through the fact
of his world of feeling being plunged down into the life of
animal existence, during the life between birth and
death.

You see, we
come here to the point of view that until our age was held
more or less secret by the brotherhoods that believed, partly
justly, partly unjustly, that other men were not ripe enough
for such things. If you gain the knowledge of what is related
to the animal nature in the world of the dead, if you look
about, you then see that all this belongs to the living
element filled with feeling. The human being has also this
living element filled with feeling in his soul. But in what
way? Between birth and death he possesses it in such a way
that were it not locked up in his subconsciousness he could
at every moment employ this living element filled with
feeling, which exists in the period between birth and death,
for the destruction of the remainder of this element in the
world. So just imagine what that really means. You yourself,
in your personal life, live as a
living-element-filled-with-feeling, which, however,
is enclosed in the boundaries that are drawn into the
physical human being. If human beings were to have this
element generally, freely at their disposal —
anthroposophists will already be more cultivated in this
regard — then they could, in every instance, employ
these concealed forces to destroy the living element filled
with feeling that is lying in their environment.

The animal
nature in the human being is primarily, even in the most
exact meaning of the word, a destructive one. And it is even
endowed with the capacity to destroy. And when the individual
has passed through death's door, then it is his task above
everything to tear out of his soul all the impulses that have
then become free in such a way that there is really a very
great deal remaining of the desire to destroy the living, to
kill the living. And it can be said, that to have respect and
reverence for all living things is something that the
departed must learn above everything else. This reverence for
everything living is something that can be looked upon as the
self-evident evolution of the departed. So just as we here
with inner participation follow a child which as a matter of
course evolves from a small infant onward, gradually from day
to day, from week to week, just as we follow up with this
child the way the soul takes hold of the fleshly bodily
nature, having great joy in what happens without the
cooperation of the so-called free will, in what occurs there
through the pure organic forces of the soul; so in a similar
manner, when we follow up the course taken by the departed
from the day of his death onward through his life after
death, we again behold the development of the deepest
reverence for all living beings in the environment, a
development from which free will has been withdrawn.

This is
something which, as it were, happens like an external side in
the departed, just as with the child this occurs as an
external side through its growing up, by its traits becoming
more expressive. What increases externally in the child to
our joy, in like manner increases in the departed by our
discovering something radiating from him, more and more
through his holding every living thing sacred in such an
exalted way. But in this connection an important difference
occurs between the life after death and the life here on
earth. The life here has concealed by a veil just that in
which the departed must deepen himself. We perceive the world
through our senses and form for ourselves certain laws which
we call the laws of nature, according to which we then form
round about us our mechanical instruments, our tools. What we
erect round about us according to the laws of nature is
indeed essentially a world of the dead. We must even kill the
plant, even the tree, when we wish to place its wood at the
service of our mechanical arts. And again it belongs to the
most staggering knowledge, that in reality everything which
our senses teach us, when we apply it by means of our will,
is something destructive and cannot be anything else but
something destructive.

Even when we
create a work of art we must take part in the world of
destruction. What we thus create first arises out of
destruction. A beneficent world wisdom has only caused us at
first to shrink back, as human beings, from placing what
lives (generally speaking, from the animal-world
upward) at the service of mechanical art. In a certain higher
sense, however, everything lives in the world. You
will already realize this from the various accounts given
during the course of the year. But what do we do in reality
when we place at the service of mechanical art that which we
perceive through our senses and combine through our
understanding? We continually carry death into life. Even a
Raphael painting cannot come into being unless death is
carried into life. Before a Raphael painting arises it
contains more life than afterwards. In the universe this is
compensated only through the fact that souls appear who enjoy
the Raphael painting and receive from it an impulse, a strong
impression. The impulse, the impression which the creating or
enjoying soul receives, this alone can help to overcome the
forces of death, even when the highest treasure, the
so-called highest spiritual possessions of mankind are
created here on the physical plane. Essentially, the earth
will be destroyed because through their mechanical acts human
beings carry death into the earth in such a strong measure.
The earth will no longer be able to live, because the forces
of death prevail over that which can be saved and carried
over into the world of Jupiter, beyond the decay of the
physical earth. But out of what human beings have created by
weaving together death and life — out of what they have
thus created — they will have regained a soul content
which they will then carry over into the world of
Jupiter.

Death or
the destruction of what is living, continually weaves
into life, more than words can say; it weaves in human
activity itself, through the fact that between birth and
death [unreadable] human activity is intimately interwoven
with the sense of [unreadable]. Indeed, consciousness arises
because death weaves itself into life. Man would not
accomplish his task on earth, as far as consciousness is
concerned, were he not called upon to weave death into life.
Even within ourselves we kill the life of the nerves the very
moment in which we form a thought; for a really living nerve
cannot form thoughts. In recent public lectures I have said
that — “We enter into the life of our nerves
through a constant death-process.”

In this respect
the life between death and a new birth is the exact opposite.
There it is essential for the human soul to acquire the habit
of holding holy all that is living, of
permeating the living with ever more and more
life.

In this manner
the life between birth and death is connected with death; the
life between death and a new birth, with the life of the
whole. An animal kingdom lives upon the earth only through
the fact that man dies and sends his impulses from the
spiritual world into the life of the animals.

The second
thing which man learns to know after death is the kingdom of
the human soul itself, regardless of whether these human
souls are embodied here in physical bodies or have already
passed through the gate of death. After death, man faces the
animal world with the feeling that when he carries out an
action, something experiences joy, or another being, at least
something possessing being, suffers pain. He knows that he
strikes against living reality when his spiritual force alone
hits against this. Here it is more a universal living and
weaving within living reality. In regard to the familiarity
with what exists in our own human sphere after we are dead,
it is so, that when another soul enters into a relationship
with us, after we ourselves have passed through the gate of
death, we become aware that our own life-feeling is either
strengthened or diminished, according to the way in which we
face this soul. Through our relation to a certain soul,
regardless of whether it dwells here upon the earth or in the
spiritual world, we feel that we become inwardly
strengthened. Our companionship with this soul strengthens us
in a certain way; our inner forces become stronger and at the
same time more alive. We meet this soul and feel that it
makes us more awake than we would have been otherwise. An
intimate sense of life streams toward us with a certain
intensity, through our companionship with this soul. Instead,
the relationship with another soul may weaken us in the
direction of certain forces and dim down our life, as it
were.

Our
companionship with souls consists therein that we feel our
own life surging livingly in this relationship with
the others. We live out our life of feeling and will as human
beings between birth and death without knowing that the souls
of the dead live in the waves of this life of feeling and
will, which we sleep and dream away. They are always there;
they live in the waves of our own feeling and will, and they
live there in such a way that they experience this life
with us. While we experience the surrounding world
through our senses as something external, the dead live in
the impulses of our feelings and will; they are far more
intimately bound together with us than we, insofar as we
are physically embodied, are bound together with our
surroundings.

It is so that
this life — or better, this experiencing, this inner
presence in life — of the dead, develops gradually in
accordance with the conditions that have been spun out during
our life here. Assuredly we live together with all souls
after death; this is true, but we know nothing about it.
Relationships set in slowly and gradually; namely, with souls
with whom we have formed connections during our life between
birth and death. We cannot form new relationships,
original connections with other human beings during
the life between death and a new birth; we can form no such
connections originally and directly. When we have loved or
hated someone here, i.e., when we were connected with him
either in a positive or in a negative way, this again rises
from a gray spiritual depth, in the gradual awakening of the
life after death, so that we live within these souls, as I
have just described.

Thus, a great
part of this experiencing, or this inner life-presence of the
dead, consists in the fact that everything that exists in the
form of a link with other souls, during our last or earlier
incarnations, gradually rises up from a gray spiritual depth.
This can widen out — and in the case of many departed
souls it widens out very soon after death — but in an
immediate way. Someone may die; he may have stood in some
kind of relationship to a soul dwelling either on the earth
or in the spiritual world. This relationship appears before
him once more after death, as I have described just now. But
this soul with whom he is linked up has relations with other
souls, with whom, perhaps, he has never come into contact
during any of his lives between birth and death. But here,
after death, such souls can establish an indirect contact
with the so-called dead soul, and thus enter into
relationship with him.

But, as I have
already said, these are never direct connections, for they
are always mediated by the souls with whom we are linked up
karmically through our physical life. The connection with
souls where no relationship has been established during
physical life is always quite a different one, and is
transmitted through the soul who was connected with us in
physical life.

You can easily
realize, now, that first there are direct, then indirect
relationships. Through the fact, however, that all souls are
more or less connected with one another throughout the earth,
and that during his long life between death and a new birth,
man forms, indirectly at least, many new connections —
through this fact, the human being enters a very wide field
of mutual experience with other souls, if we also take into
consideration these indirect relationships. Even when we are
here on earth we have already within us this living-into
other souls. In the spiritual world we have lived together
with innumerable souls, over and over again. The feeling of
being at one with all souls, which an abstract philosophy
considers only abstractly, and discusses as an abstract
at-oneness, has its quite concrete side. Namely,
that souls are scarcely to be found over the whole earth with
whom there is not at least a distant and indirect connection.
We must grasp this fact as concretely as possible, then this
will lead us to something real. What the departed experiences
is thus a gradual growing into and awakening into a world
based, in a wider sense, on his karma. An inward
brightness that increases more and more spreads, as it were,
over this world, as our experiences become richer in this
second realm, which is based upon the animalic realm, just as
our experiences in the plant realm are based upon the mineral
realm. Our experiences become ever richer and richer.

Imagine this
experience extending in all concrete directions, and you will
obtain a great deal of that which permeates the soul of the
departed between death and a new birth; for all thoughts that
connect us in any way with other souls are bound up with this
experience. Herein lies an infinitely rich world. Essentially
is it so (you will gather this from the cycle on
Life Between Death and Rebirth)
that during the first
half of this life between death and a new birth, the
development is more filled with wisdom, more permeated with
wisdom. In a wise way man becomes accustomed to the
connections that he gradually draws up again out of the
spiritual depth. He becomes familiar with all this in a very
wise way. Essentially, the threads leading to all karmic
relationships of a direct or indirect nature begin in what I
have called in the Mystery Plays “The Midnight Hour of
Being.” Then follows the further working out, and then
an element of force, similar to the will, but only similar,
not exactly the same — enters into the life of the soul.
This element of force, similar to the will, makes the human
being stronger and stronger. Above all, it strengthens
those impulses in him that are added to the
wisdom-filled survey of the world, as elements and impulses
pertaining to the will, as impulses of force.

A certain form
of will becomes active in man during the second half of the
life between death and a new birth. If we observe this will
(we can do this especially in the case of souls who, through
this or that circumstance, have a shorter or a shortened life
between death and new birth) we find that the will takes a
peculiar direction, which may be characterized by saying
— the will arises in order to wipe out in some way the
traces of our life, the traces of karma.

Please grasp
this quite clearly. Such a will, aiming at the effacement of
the traces of karma, becomes more and more evident in man.
This effacement of the traces of karma is connected with the
deepest secrets of human life. Were man to have a
continual and full survey of the wisdom which he can
acquire very soon, comparatively soon, after death, then
there would be numberless human beings who would prefer to
wipe out the traces of their existence, rather than enter
into new lives. The elaboration of our earlier lives into a
karmic connection, which we achieve, can only be achieved
because we are dulled by certain beings of the higher
hierarchy during the second half of the life between death
and a new birth; we are paralyzed in regard to the light of
wisdom, so that we restrict our activity and our will-
impulses more and more. And we must say that the aim of this
is to restrict them in such a way that we create what can
then become united with a physical human body in the stream
of heredity, and can live out its earthly destiny in this
physical body.

We can only
understand these thoughts fully when we consider earthly
destiny itself. How dream-like this earthly destiny is for
man on earth! As a child he accustoms himself gradually to
the conditions of earthly life. What we call destiny comes to
him in the form of single life experiences. Out of the woof
of these life experiences, something is formed which is in
reality man himself. For think what you would be as far as
the present day, had you not lived through your own
particular destiny! You can indeed say — I myself
am what I have experienced as destiny. You would be
quite another human being had you experienced a different
destiny. And yet, how strange destiny seems to be, how little
interwoven with what man calls his ego! In how many countless
cases the ego feels itself struck by destiny! Why? Because
what we ourselves do towards the molding of our destiny
remains hidden in the subconsciousness. What we experience
takes up its place in the world of sense-experience and in
the world of thoughts. It merely strikes against our feeling
life. Our feeling life remains passive to this. What we have
in common with the realm of the dead springs forth actively
out of our feeling life and out of the life of the will
impulses. What springs forth in this way, and what we
ourselves do without our consciousness, by dreaming
and sleeping through it, this forms our destiny; we ourselves
are this. We dream and sleep through all we do toward the
molding of our own destiny. We wake in what we
experience as our destiny, but only because it
remains unconscious. What is it that remains in reality
unconscious? That which sounds across as impulses, out of
earlier incarnations on earth, and out of the life between
death and a new birth in a purely spiritual way — out
of the regions where also the dead are to be found
— a region which we dream and sleep away. At the same
time, these are forces that come also from ourselves. They
are the forces with which we mold our destiny. We weave our
destiny out of the same region that the dead inhabit in
common with us.

Think how we
grow together with this world, of which we now know something
to a certain extent — how we sleep through it and how we
experience it — although we have not yet spoken of the
experiences in connection with the beings of the higher
hierarchies. This will also be considered. But what I wish to
convey in a description of this kind is that we must place
the realm of the so-called dead within the same realm in
which we ourselves live, and we must become conscious of the
fact that we feel separated from the dead (but in reality we
are not separated from them) only because we dream
and sleep away our feeling-life and will-life, where the
dead are. However, something else can be found in this world
that we dream and sleep away, something that man as a rule
does not follow at all in his usual consciousness. Sometimes
he becomes aware of this when it appears before him in
specially striking cases; but these are exceptional,
outstanding cases, which only draw attention to what is
always permeating life and streaming through it. You
yourselves will have heard of many cases resembling the
following one: —

Someone is in
the habit of taking a daily walk; it leads him to a mountain
slope. He goes there every day; it is his special pleasure.
One day he goes there again as usual. Suddenly, while he is
walking, he hears something like a voice, although it is not
a physical voice, which tells him: — Why are you taking
this walk? Can you really not do without this pleasure? It
speaks more or less like this. He begins to hesitate and
turns aside, in order to think over what has just happened to
him. In this instant a piece of rock rolls down; it would
quite certainly have struck him, had he not turned aside.

This is a true
story, but one that only points out sensationally something
that is always present in our lives. How often you plan to do
this or that — and this or that prevents you. Think how
many things would have been different, even in the smallest
experiences of life, had you started out at an appointed
hour, instead of half an hour later, because something
detained you. Think what changes have thus come into your
life; what changes have also come into the lives of many
other people! It is quite easy to picture this. Let us
suppose that you have planned to take a walk at 3:30 PM; you
were supposed to meet another person and to tell him some
news that he, in his turn, would have told to someone else.
Because you came too late you do not tell him this news; this
was not done, and with a certain right. Here we see a
universal order of laws that differs from the one that we
describe as a necessity of Nature. It consists therein, that
someone is prevented from continuing his walk because he
hears a voice that causes him to turn aside, and thus saves
him from being struck dead by the falling piece of rock. We
feel that here a different world system is at work. But this
world system permeates our existence always, not merely when
such sensational events take place. Even in such matters, we
are used to see only the sensational aspect of
things. We do not notice this other world. Why? Because we
turn our gaze toward the events that occur in our life and in
our surroundings and not toward the events that do
not occur, events that are continually being
prevented, continually being hindered.

From a certain
moment in spiritual experience, that which does not happen is
held back from us. That from which we are, as it were,
prevented, can rise up in our consciousness in the same way
as that which does happen; except that it comes to our
consciousness as another world system. Try to place this
world system before your souls by saying to yourselves: man
is accustomed to look only at what happens and not at what
has been prevented from happening. What he does not notice in
this case is intimately connected with the realm in which the
dead are, in which we ourselves are with our dreamlike
feeling and sleeping will. Within us, we cut ourselves off
from this other world because dream and sleep play also into
our waking life. All that seethes, lives and weaves beneath
the boundary which separates our thinking from our feeling
contains, at the same time, the secrets that build not only
the bridge between the so-called living and the so-called
dead, but also the bridge between the realm of necessity and
the realm of freedom and of so-called chance.